This is an ambitious and provocative book written by disability studies specialists, rather than historians. The authors argue that current approaches to disability are haunted by “phantoms of the past” (p. xii), and that it is timely to reflect upon the cultural heritage of past practice, particularly eugenics, which, they claim, “lurked like a social phantasm just below the surface, determining the standards, manner and parameters of our cultural, political and intellectual debate about embodied differences” (p. x). The authors examine a range of “cultural locations of disability” that have been set out on behalf of disabled people in western Europe and the United States—nineteenth-century charity systems, institutions for the feeble minded, the disability research industry, sheltered workshops, film representations of disability and current academic work in disability studies. Their theoretical framework is that these cultural locations construe disability as undesirable deviation from the norm, and that this is a consistent theme, attributable to the persistence of eugenic thought. The comfortable belief that eugenics perished with the revelations of Nazi extermination practices, is one they seek to demolish. It is difficult to do justice to such a wide ranging book in a short review. The central thesis, namely the persistence of eugenic thought, was for me the most interesting strand. Overall, it is argued that a historical understanding of disability is underdeveloped. Even the extermination of disabled people by the Nazis has not received the attention it warrants. The chapter entitled ‘The eugenic Atlantic’ lays out the proposition that far from an aberration, eugenics was central to European and American efforts to engineer a healthy society, and that disability “functioned as the hub that provided cross-cultural utility” to fears around racial and sexual weakness (p. 101). Rather than being nation specific, they argue that eugenic thought between the two world wars crossed and recrossed the Atlantic, creating an “unprecedented level of scientific and governmental exchange over what to do with those designated with physical, sensory, and cognitive ‘defects’” (p.103). Far from Germany being unique, they regard its extermination practices as a logical extension of transnational biological targeting of defective conditions. The argument is developed that eugenics grouped people with widely divergent physical and cognitive characteristics into a single “defective” group. Whereas most historians of disability distinguish between treatment regimes for physical and mental impairment, Snyder and Mitchell contend that physical stigmata were regarded as indicative of cognitive incapacity, and that eugenics represents “a concerted movement to rid disabilities from a country's national spaces” (p. 120). This central argument is then developed, through analysis of documentary films, to apply to contemporary disability practice. Unsurprisingly, a debt is acknowledged to Foucault's work, particularly Abnormal (2003). Despite euphemistic names suggestive of kindness—nursing homes, sheltered workshops, 24-hour care facilities—Snyder and Mitchell portray these as punitive regimes infused with eugenic thinking and methodologies. Disabled people are fair game for research, “perpetually available for all kinds of intrusions, both public and private” (p.187). The book ends with a provocative reflection on the place of disability studies in the academy, “the unruly child” which, by affording voice to disabled people's desires, threatens the medical and public health disciplines that seek to control and to cure disability. It asks the important question of whether disability studies can itself escape a role which subjugates the very people it seeks to represent, and presents some tentative answers. I am glad I read this book. It ranges widely, and makes some sweeping generalizations. Although it is hard to agree with it in every detail, as a contribution to understanding of disability, past and present, it is a book not to be missed.